Jack and Suzy Welch

“Ignore him, he’s a whack job.”

“She’s just bitter she didn’t get promoted.”

“He’s been shooting his mouth off for years – and it’s always nothing.”

Those lines sound familiar? If you work in business, they probably do – it’s how people talk about whistleblowers. Shocking? It’s just the truth. Even though whistleblowers may have a noble reputation in the media, gracing magazine covers and prime-time TV spots, when they surface within a company, management almost always brushes them off with a discrediting back story or a little piece of history that explains away all their annoying accusations. And here’s why that happens: In the vast majority of cases, whistleblowers are, to some degree, crazy or vengeful or both.

Until, one terrible, awful day when, speaking out of vengefulness or ethical earnestness, the whistleblower also happens to be telling the truth. And then, well, you get a crisis like the one Wal-Mart finds itself tangled in today.

Now, make no mistake. We think Wal-Mart is a great company. It’s created upward mobility for thousands of people and a million-plus jobs around the world, and it remains the American consumer’s greatest ally in the war against inflation. Furthermore, the recent accusations against Wal-Mart are just that – accusations.

But those allegations, proven true or not, still offer an important lesson to everyone in business, and we don’t mean the one that’s being widely bandied about right now – that big companies like Wal-Mart, because of their size and power, engage in corruption because they can. We don’t think that’s generally true. Nor do we think the biggest take-away from the Wal-Mart story is how hard it is for American companies to do business abroad without bribery. Actually, it’s perfectly possible to operate globally – and win – while playing by good old American rules and regulations.

No, to us, the Wal-Mart story is most importantly a reminder of the pervasive, even understandable, impulse within companies to ignore whistleblowers because they’re so often time-wasters. And it’s a reminder of why you can’t turn your back on them.

Ever.

In fact, the only way to deal with a whistleblower’s accusations – again, every single time and often against your own instincts – is with a hyper-bias toward believing that the informant is onto something big. Such a bias must impel you to investigate every claim ferociously. You may think it’s a waste of time and money, and will go nowhere; you should be so lucky. And for goodness’ sake, don’t let the investigation be conducted by the boss who’s been accused of wrongdoing! Bring in an outside agency to do the sleuthing, or at the very least, executives outside the scope of the alleged problem, with no relationship to the people involved. Yes, you may hate the whole mishegaas and so might everyone it touches. But it’s the only way to overcompensate for the propensity to wish whistleblowers away with the perfunctory spot check or the “Everything O.K.?” kind of look-see that usually occurs.

Now, in the months ahead, Wal-Mart will very likely experience the five steps that characterize virtually every organizational crisis. First, the company will quickly come to see that its problem is actually much worse than it originally appeared. That’s the nature of these kinds of things; the first report of wrongdoing is usually just the tip of the iceberg. Second, Wal-Mart will find there are no secrets in this world. Every last detail of the Mexico situation – and of the corporate cover-up, if there was one – will eventually seep out. Third, Wal-Mart’s handling of the crisis will be depicted in the press in the worst possible light. Being vilified goes with the territory. And fourth, there will be “changes.” That is, someone at Wal-Mart will be fired for what’s happened, and maybe many more “someones” will share the fall.

Finally, though, Wal-Mart will become a better company for it. That’s the good news about every ugly crisis. It teaches you something your organization desperately needed to know and usually ensures the same mistake will never happen again.

It’s too bad, though, that this crisis had to happen in the first place. And it wouldn’t have, if Wal-Mart had done a very hard, very necessary thing.

Taken every whistleblower at his word.

Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric for 21 years and is the founder of the Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University. Suzy Welch is an author, speaker and the former Editor of the Harvard Business Review.

PHOTO: A general view of a Wal-Mart store in Mexico City, April 24, 2012. REUTERS/Edgard Garrido

Pick any hot topic over the past decade or two – tax policy, Social Security, nuclear power, American Idol, you name it – and if you put a dozen people in a room, you’d get a cacophony of opinions.

But ask those same people, “So, what morning show do you watch?” and you’d just as likely get one big chorus back, saying, “Today, of course!”

The Today Show’s ratings domination is legendary.

Actually, make that “was” legendary. During the week of Apr. 9, the program drew 13,000 fewer viewers than its longtime (and formerly distant) rival Good Morning America. The loss, as was so gaspingly reported, broke Today’s epic 852-week winning streak.

To which we say, “What a lucky break!”

No – not for GMA, but for Today, because its loss means something very exciting is about to happen. The show is about to start experiencing business as it should always be experienced by every organization: as if each and every day were the last quarter of the Super Bowl.

Gordon Gekko famously proclaimed greed to be the central tenet of business. What tripe. The real, galvanizing truism about business is that competition is good. In fact, it’s great.

Look, competition is what makes work more than clocking hours and turns it into something powerfully exhilarating, something about pushing harder, reaching farther and building the future. How? By making companies think smarter, run faster and operate more sharply. By driving teams to coalesce and getting people to share ideas across all sorts of boundaries. By sparking innovation in everything from product design to process engineering.

But perhaps best of all, competition transforms work because it takes people’s focus off the Byzantine internal workings of a company – who’s got the bigger cubicle, who went to lunch with the boss on Tuesday – and puts it where it belongs, on the external world of customers and market dynamics. It replaces the all-too-human proclivity for office politics with a much more productive fixation on results, as in, “Let’s promote that new guy Sam right away. Sure he’s a little rough around the edges, but the customers adore him.”

Competition, you see, is all about having the guts to make status-quo-busting decisions on a daily basis. It’s about playing as though you’re not winning even if you are. Yes, that’s hard, especially when your numbers are all right. And especially when you’ve been comfortable for a good long while. But if you ever hear yourself saying something like, “We’ve got things under control,” slap yourself. If you don’t operate in a heightened state of paranoia about even the competitive threats you cannot yet see and don’t want to imagine, you’re asking to decay, or worse, to be demolished. Just ask RIM, Nokia, Circuit City, Sony and Best Buy.

Of course, it practically goes without saying that the biggest beneficiaries of heightened competition are consumers. When companies are trying to outdo each other, obviously the customer experiences the upside of the fray. (Indeed, to see the reverse of this theory in action, all you have to do is visit your local DMV to witness the mind-numbing effects of monopolies in action, so to speak.) The good news is, when consumers win, so do many of the companies creatively competing to serve them. It’s the ultimate virtuous economic circle.

So, sure, the people on the Today team must have felt disappointed when their winning streak hit a wall. But to repeat, we’re excited for them. We’re excited for any company that gets to experience that kind of exhilaration – and the flat-out fun that a good competitive fight brings to the game of business.

And like millions of other customers, we can’t wait to enjoy the results.

Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric for 21 years and is the founder of the Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University. Suzy Welch is an author, speaker and the former Editor of the Harvard Business Review.

PHOTO: ‘Today’ show host Ann Curry talks with fans during Meredith Vieira’s final show in New York, June 8, 2011. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

Remember that incompetent boss you used to have? He was a good guy and all, but he just couldn’t make decisions or prioritize. Perhaps worst of all, he tried to make everyone happy, resulting in almost everyone being angry or confused or both. And remember how long it took management to move him out – and how aggravating that was?

Of course, at the time, you sort of understood why the Bigs had promoted the guy in the first place, and why they held out hope for so long. He’d been a superstar salesman. Best the company had seen in ages. But in the end, it turned out that all the things that made him great as an individual performer made him lousy as a people manager.

It happens all the time at work. A brilliant engineer promoted to run R&D. A gifted reporter elevated to editor. A cutting-edge scientist made head of the lab. First cheers. Then, after a bit, confusion about organizational direction, mixed signals about values, hurt feelings left and right and, eventually, chaos.

Look, in business, some people can really knock it out of the park in their current jobs. They just can’t lead.

Smart companies get that reality. In fact, most have learned the hard way that actually being a great leader involves unique skills that even the most promising candidate for a leadership job simply may not possess.

But do the American people get that reality, too?

You have to wonder. Because there’s an awful lot of noise out there right now about campaign styles. President Obama has a reputation built on his soaring oratory, while Mitt Romney, clearly no fan of crowd scenes, can’t seem to get through a week without an awkward (or worse, foot-in-mouth) moment.

The president really knows how to run for office, the pundits note. Romney – not so much.

As if it matters.

It doesn’t, of course. Just as in business, in politics, being very good at one job (like delivering well-written speeches from a teleprompter) doesn’t necessarily make you very good at the next (like leading the free world).

What voters need to do right now is stop focusing on stump skills, or lack thereof, and start fixating on which candidate will be the better president once the campaign is long over. They need to stop asking, “Who’s more appealing on TV?” and start asking, “Who’s got the right stuff to get America working again?”

Yes, in some part, every person’s answer to that question will be driven by the issues – from healthcare to taxes to energy policy. And in this election, the ideological divide is stark indeed, with Obama supporting government centralization that borders on European-type socialism and Romney in favor of decentralization, state and individual rights and free-market capitalism.

Stark, too, is the difference between the candidates’ leadership styles.

Over the past three years, Obama has taken a sort of divide-and-conquer approach, amassing a list of enemies that would make Richard Nixon proud – bankers, healthcare insurance providers, oil companies, wealthy taxpayers, Congress and, most recently, the Supreme Court. Surely his supporters must think this particular tactic is effective, but there can be no denying that the country is more polarized than when Obama took office.

Without doubt, Romney is not the model leader (his apparent lack of authenticity can be jarring), but he has a quality that would serve him well as president – good old American pragmatism. Perhaps that’s the businessman in him. Or perhaps you just learn to do what you’ve got to do when you’re a GOP governor in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts or the man charged with salvaging the scandal-ridden Salt Lake City Olympics. If Romney’s long record suggests anything, it’s that he knows how to manage people and organizations to get things accomplished without a lot of internecine warfare.

Look, Obama may be a great campaigner and Romney (to date) somewhat the opposite. But neither man is running to be Campaigner-in-Chief.

In politics, as in business, the leader’s job needs to be filled by a leader, and no effective leader, regardless of ideology, keeps an enemies list.

Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric for 21 years and is the founder of the Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University. Suzy Welch is an author, speaker and the former Editor of the Harvard Business Review.

PHOTOS: U.S. Republican presidential candidate and former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney speaks during a campaign event in Wilmington, Delaware April 10, 2012. REUTERS/Tim Shaffer U.S. President Barack Obama speaks about tax fairness and the economy at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida, April 10, 2012. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

In the great, collective gasp that followed Greg Smith’s blistering public resignation from Goldman Sachs, one reaction struck us as particularly prophetic. It was a comment from James Gorman, CEO of Morgan Stanley. Don’t exploit Goldman’s woes, he said a few days after Smith’s letter ran in the New York Times: “There but for the grace of God go us.”

Some took Gorman’s remark as an admission of sorts – as if he were saying, “Hey, Smith’s criticisms could’ve been leveled at any firm on Wall Street.” Others took Gorman at his word when he explained that he meant all companies are vulnerable to a disgruntled employee who joins forces with a simpatico media outlet.

But we have a third interpretation that, to our minds, is far scarier than either of those takes. The Greg Smith case is a harsh reminder that most companies don’t face up to one of the most immutable rules of business: Your soft culture matters as much as your hard numbers, and if your company’s culture is to mean anything, you have to hang – publicly – those in your midst who would destroy it. It’s a grim image, we know. But the fact is, creating a healthy, high-integrity organizational culture is not puppies and rainbows. And yet for some reason, too many leaders think a company’s values can be relegated to a five-minute conversation between HR and a new employee. Or they think culture is about picking which words – do we “honor” our customers or “respect” them? — to engrave on a plaque in the lobby. What nonsense.

An organization’s culture is not about words at all. It’s about behavior – and consequences.

It’s about every single individual who manages people knowing that his or her key role is that of Chief Values Officer, with Sarbanes-Oxley-like enforcement powers to match. It’s about knowing that at every performance review, employees are evaluated for both their numbers and their values, and that only four outcomes exist.

First, for employees with good numbers and good values – onward and upward.

For those with bad numbers and bad values – you’re outta here.

As for employees with good values but mediocre numbers – the stance should be, we’ll give you another chance with more coaching. Your behavior has earned you that.

Which leaves the type of employee who most commonly brings companies to their knees: the one with the great numbers and crummy values. The employee who doesn’t share ideas with co-workers, who belittles customers behind their backs, who kisses up to the hierarchy but kicks down his own people – all while bringing in the numbers.

Ninety percent of the time, managers give these people a big fat pass. “I know Jim can be a real jerk,” they say, “but I just need him until the economy stabilizes.” Or “Sure, Sally’s attitude upsets everyone, but I’ve spoken to her. I think she’s going to come around.”

Actually, all Jim and Sally are doing is sending a big fat message to every other employee: Our company’s values are a joke. And the only antidote is to send Jim and Sally home, and not with the usual “They want to spend more time with their families” BS out of the lawyers and HR, but with the truth. “Jim and Sally had great numbers,” everyone needs to be told, “but they didn’t demonstrate the values of this company.” We guarantee such a public “dis play,” to put it more politely, will have more impact than a hundred “Our values really, really matter!” speeches by the CEO.

The Smith case occurred on Wall Street, but to be clear, we’re talking about a problem that exists well beyond the canyons of lower Manhattan. “Values drift” is pervasive in companies of every ilk, from sea to shining sea. Employees either don’t know their organization’s values, or they know that practicing them is optional. Either way, the result is vulnerability to attack, from inside and out, and rightly so.

Look, it’s Management 101 to say that the best competitive weapon a company can ever possess is a strong culture. But the devil is in the details of execution.

And if you don’t get it right, it’s the devil to pay.

Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric for 21 years and is the founder of the Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University. Suzy Welch is an author, speaker and the former Editor of the Harvard Business Review.

PHOTO: A Goldman Sachs sign is seen on at the company’s post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, January 18, 2012. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

If one word sums up the analysis that has followed Super Tuesday, it’s got to be “Huh?”

Or taken out of shorthand: “Why is it that Mitt Romney — a candidate with mountains of credentials, a boatload of cash and six years of planning — loses where he should win and only squeaks by where he should clobber, all while Rick Santorum, a long shot if there ever was one, goes around capturing hearts and votes?”

“Huh?” indeed.

Not that there aren’t plenty of answers to this question. Quite the opposite. Everyone in the pundit-sphere, it appears, agrees in one form or another that Romney’s problem is about connecting with people.

He just doesn’t seem, as the nattering goes, very authentic.

And the nattering is onto something. True, authenticity alone doesn’t make you a leader, but you sure can’t be a leader for very long without it. The reason’s simple. Authenticity makes people like you, trust you — and follow you.

Surely Mitt Romney, who’s been running organizations for decades, knows that in his bones. And in fact, people who know him well often speak of how Romney has always been a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of guy. Smart, candid, self-deprecating and, well, just sort of hilariously square.

But where is that guy now? Probably running scared. Scared of turning off any given constituency that might put him over the finish line.

What an irony — and what a mistake. When it comes to leadership, guarded behavior may minimize the ire of your enemies, but it doesn’t energize anyone either.

That’s why, like every leader, Romney needs to let go of the fear of offending people and embrace his authentic side. Mitt needs to let Mitt be Mitt. And so, in a nod to the social-media phenomenon, albeit with a slightly different name, we offer a short list of “Stuff Authentic People Say.”

First, to quote the great philosopher Popeye, you often hear authentic people give you some version of, “I yam what I yam, and that’s all what I yam.” You know what we mean. Authentic people are deeply comfortable with themselves; they acknowledge without phoniness where they’ve come from and who they’ve become, both the good and not-so-good, through life’s accidents and their own hard work and ambition. Consider, for example, none less than Oprah, who rose to prominence not by hiding her painful past but by sharing it. And then, once famous, continuing to lay her humanity bare on a daily basis.

Second, authentic people say “I love” a lot, as in “I love Vegas!” and “I love March Madness!” You name it, they’re emoting about it. By the same token, authentic people also tend to throw around “I hate” quite a bit, as in, “I can’t stand people who don’t talk at meetings,” and “I despise Muzak.” Who knows why they’re so passionate? Maybe being candid about your roots and identity gives you self-confidence — you’re not hiding anything — and that self-confidence allows you to be exuberant about your beliefs, values and opinions. But that’s just a theory. All we know is what we’ve observed forever. And that is, when it comes to love and hate, authentic people go big.

Third and finally, authentic people aren’t afraid to say, “I’ve screwed up, and I’ve been down and it was awful.” In fact, very authentic people actually seem to relish describing mistakes in all their gritty detail. Take Ted Turner. Talking about the AOL-Time Warner deal, he once said, “It had to be one of the biggest business mistakes ever made. We went into it half-cocked and unprepared. And a lot of people were wiped out because of it, including me.”

Now, it’s important to note that in the next breath, Turner started talking about how he regained his stature and fortune. The grind and the sweat of coming back — they’re also part of the authentic person’s narrative. But they wouldn’t be half the fun if they didn’t start with an authentic person’s favorite place…the proverbial gutter.

Surely our authenticity checklist could go on. Everyone who’s worked with an authentic leader could probably add a few bullet points. But these three strike us as foundational: I know my reality, I know my values and I know I’m a big, wonderful, imperfect mess like everyone else.

Without doubt, Romney is not the first leader — particularly in politics — to have sublimated his true self along the way. But in this life, it’s never too late to reclaim your authenticity.

Your followers are waiting.

Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric for 21 years and is the founder of the Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University. Suzy Welch is an author, speaker and the former Editor of the Harvard Business Review.

PHOTO: Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney speaks at his “Super Tuesday” primary election-night rally in Boston, March 6, 2012. REUTERS/Jessica Rinaldi

Can you stand to read one more thing about the lin-credible, lin-tense, lin-probable Jeremy Lin without going totally lin-sane?

Yes, we’re going there.

Not just because we’re crazy about Lin’s on-court heroics for the New York Knicks (although we are) or his off-court humility (which we also love.)

But because when you manage to put aside all hootin’-and-hollerin’ about Jeremy Lin, his nation-gripping story just so happens to offer an important lesson for business leaders.

Give your bench a chance.

That’s right, your bench. Those twenty- and early thirty-somethings in your place who you think need a little more exposure outside their functional area, or a few more years of people management, or maybe just plain more life experience before they move up a small rung to the next, wholly predictable level. Them. The ones you’ve got in a holding pattern because the company Establishment — which might very well include you, if you can bring yourself to admit it — has deemed they’re “not ready yet.”

Jeremy Lin is a reminder that one, two or even more of them might be ready for their own hoop dreams, if you’d only have the guts to take them off the bench.

Think about it. Some of the most successful companies in America today were started by guys barely into their shaving years – Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook being the most obvious examples.

But even putting aside those massive success stories, hundreds, if not thousands, of thriving companies of every ilk have sprung from the minds of youthful founders with passion, a great idea, some venture capital funding and, perhaps most important of all, no fatheaded old bureaucrat telling them, “Wait your turn.”

Now, clearly there are times when a young employee truly does need to mature, learn additional skills or get the proverbial rough edges smoothed off before he or she is handed a big hunk of responsibility. Indeed, all of us have seen the havoc that can be caused by people promoted too soon — before they knew how to get a bundle of ideas actually executed, or talk to a prickly subordinate about underperformance, or navigate a team through an unexpected competitive onslaught.

But such experiences too easily can become the standard excuse for letting “promising high potentials” – as they’re so often called — wait until resentment festers. And the worst part is, such career squashing even happens to individuals who’ve demonstrated they have something really special going on – who’re particularly smart and energized, for instance, and have a knack for getting people to rally around them.

Even they get the Jeremy Lin waiver treatment too often.

But look, the facts are, there’s really only an upside in giving such people the break they crave.

First of all, they may really do something amazing. That does tend to happen when people feel as if everything’s on the line. They grow, they stretch, they reach…and, well, they score.

Then there’s the organizational impact. Sure, some people might get cranky. “I was here seven years before I got to present to the board,” and the like. But for every bureaucracy-hugger in your organization, there will be many more motivated by the fact that passion and promise are being noticed — and actually count for something upstairs.

And finally, there’s the recruiting lift you get when you can legitimately tell great young candidates, “If you’ve got the right stuff and want to let it rip, your age will never hold you back around here. We’re all about giving people chances.”

Even if it means some chances will fail.

And some will, of course. That’s the way life is; it’s the nature of risk. Some promising young people do need more time, and some, even with opportunity handed to them, don’t have what it takes. Maybe even Jeremy Lin.

We sure hope not! His story, on and off the court, is amazing, inspiring and puts some unexpected pizzazz in this NBA season. It would be wonderful if he became a hero for the ages.

Regardless, we hope that while he’s still got everyone’s attention, people can come to see the perhaps lin-visible (sorry!) business message his story also sends.

Every company is filled with young talent just waiting to explode. Don’t let the bureaucracy keep them on the bench.

Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric for 21 years and is the founder of the Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University. Suzy Welch is an author, speaker and the former Editor of the Harvard Business Review.

PHOTO: New York Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin reacts in the fourth quarter against the Dallas Mavericks during their NBA basketball game at Madison Square Garden in New York, February 19, 2012. REUTERS/Adam Hunger

Coming up any day now, there’s going to be one helluva party at Facebook. Champagne, confetti, speechifying, really loud music — you name the hoopla. And why not? Companies don’t go public for a gazillion dollars very often.

So party on, Facebook.

Just beware the day after. Actually, beware the year after and the year after that.

Because once Facebook has its massive new liquidity infusion, the company stands to get nailed by something that can hurt a lot more, and last a lot longer, than a hangover: a changed culture. That is, a culture of diminished urgency, of game-over-we-won, of not-invented-here conceit.

Now, it practically goes without saying that such cultures can (and too often do) crop up at all sorts of companies for all sorts of reasons. But most often, arrogant or otherwise indolent cultures tend to track with colossal market success, and they definitely tend to be exacerbated when a whole slew of employees are suddenly billionaires and millionaires. It’s just plain hard to generate wide-scale paranoia, passion and humility — the defining values of an energized enterprise — when everyone’s feeling fat and happy.

And after the party, Facebook is going to be feeling pretty darn fat and happy, especially the people who’ve been around the longest and control the most action — its senior managers.

Oh, come on, you’re thinking now, Facebook’s managers aren’t stupid. They’re not going to let the IPO wreak havoc with their winning culture.

And we agree — with the first part. Surely many Facebook managers are top-notch. Look what they’ve done so far.

But they’re also up against expectations, human nature and something of a split-personality disorder.

Expectations first. By that we mean that the world (read: Wall Street analysts, shareholders and business journalists) will soon relentlessly and hungrily start expecting Facebook managers to focus their full energies on strategic matters such as how the company’s going to spend its newly created equity. Should it own the social media space by buying Twitter or Tumblr or both or neither? Should it pour money into inventing the technology that finally takes the aggravation out of mobile? Should it expand its global reach organically or by rapid acquisition?

Without doubt, these are all very important questions. And Facebook managers will understandably heed the pressure to fixate on them.

Then there’s human nature. In the buildup to an IPO, employees are often at their best — bursting with ideas, camaraderie and competitive fervor. There’s a certain optimistic frenzy in the halls and cubicles; a tirelessness. With the IPO over, there will no doubt be a companywide exhale, especially by the people who profited the most richly from the transaction. And let’s not kid ourselves: Late arrivals to the office, long lunches and a lot of happy sighing over new houses and boats do not an energized workforce make.

Finally, there’s the threat of a split-personality disorder setting in. Look, after its IPO, Facebook is going to have two classes of citizens. That’s just reality. Some of its 3,000 or so employees — several hundred in number by some counts — will have significant riches in the hand. Newer hires, though — well, they’ll mostly have options in the bush.

Someone call a motivational speaker.

Or better yet, someone make sure that Facebook’s haves care desperately about the fate of its have-nots, who will only do well if the whole company continues to grow and thrive. “Someone”…meaning Facebook’s top-notch managers.

How can they do that? Well, it actually starts with a kind of campaign stumping on their part, complete with vivid imagery and gritty stories and exciting imaginings about how Facebook is going to look in the years ahead and what it means for the life and career of all company employees. Guess what, Facebook’s leaders need to get out there and say over and over again, the future around here is going to be better than the past — way better. All it takes is every last one of us getting wildly reenergized and recommitted to our mission of making the world more open and connected.

But with all this exultant “barking,” there also needs be bite — in the form of frequent, rigorous performance reviews. The facts are, if Facebook wants urgency, speed and intensity around its mission, those behaviors must be explicit values that, when demonstrated, result in bonus money and upward mobility — or not.

To further unite its culture around its mission, post-IPO Facebook might also seriously consider evaluating its people for competitive paranoia (good), sharing of ideas (also good) and a heightened sense of purpose (same), as well as self-importance, humorlessness and BMW ownership (bad, bad and just kidding, sort of).

Not to get mired in the details of Facebook’s HR process. The bigger point we’re trying to make is that good values don’t happen by accident. Like any company with its coffers full and its managers feeling a bit impervious, Facebook — without a top-down commitment to values — runs the risk of letting its guard down and inadvertently creating an organizational mess.

Mission and values — and the culture they create — really matter.

And if Facebook gets that right after its IPO, it will really have something to party about.

Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric for 21 years and is the founder of the Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University. Suzy Welch is an author, speaker and the former Editor of the Harvard Business Review.

If there’s one concept we preach that everyone seems to agree on it’s the following: You have to face reality the way it is, not the way you want it to be.

True, right?

So why is it that so many organizations do the exact opposite? Why do they think technology will evolve at a manageable pace or that a competitor’s products will never be able to capture the hearts of their customers? Why do they say things like, “Prices will hold because costs are as rock-bottom as they’ll ever be,” or buy into notions like, “We can’t go any faster and maintain our quality”?

Such questions are rhetorical, of course. People don’t face reality the way it is because, well, because they’re people. Change – especially change that will require upending “how things are done around here” – can make us cranky, dismissive, mocking or all of the above.

And so it is that we can have a company like Kodak, which once upon a time held a mighty 90 percent market share, declare bankruptcy. Or one like Borders, the dearly departed bookseller, which missed every game-changing trend that came at it. Research In Motion, one of the fastest-growing companies in the world on its way up, threatens to become another case of a business that ends its glorious run in the disarray of reality-denial – even though its ubiquitous BlackBerry helped change the way we all work.

Former Intel CEO Andy Grove was right: When it comes to competition, as he put it in his 1999 book, “Only the paranoid survive.”

So business leaders, take heed. Figure out what’s going to blow you apart before the competition does. Stare into the future – and be afraid. Be very afraid. And if you can’t look deeply into the dark side, which some people just can’t, at least make it a point to surround yourself with one or two smart, snarky lieutenants who persistently assail your optimism with doomsday scenarios.

Hello, Mitt Romney, are you listening?

Look, it’s hardly a secret that we support former Governor Romney. He is, in our view, the most qualified and electable Republican candidate left in the race.

But we‘re concerned that Romney is not facing reality the way it is – which is that his religion is going to become a major issue. In fact, we can imagine that come the general election, Romney’s taxes and his years at Bain will be background noise and the foreground roar will be all about Mormonism.

And why wouldn’t it be? His religion was an issue last time Romney ran for national office, and America’s large bloc of vocal Evangelical Christians, which any Republican candidate will need to win the White House, has clearly signaled once again that Mormonism is an area of deep concern. And yet, even with that evident reality, it appears this is Romney’s Kodak Moment. He’s hoping and waiting.

Hoping and waiting is not a winning strategy.

Which is why Romney’s campaign, like any organization staring down certain adversity, must rapidly shore up its response and then – as disagreeable as it may feel – go on the offense. Imagine, for example, if Kodak had faced up to the onslaught of digital photography with a creative-destruction mindset, or what if Borders had embraced the possibility that e-books weren’t going away? We probably wouldn’t be mentioning them here as cautionary tales.

To escape the same fate, Romney needs to get ahead of the Mormon issue now, answering Evangelical concerns before they start to snowball, the way these things do. And despite the successful example of John F. Kennedy taking on anti-Catholic opposition in 1960 with one great speech, Romney cannot let himself think all he needs is a single “putting it to bed” foray, heavy on the separation of church and state rhetoric. Times have changed; the media have changed. Today, people talk and talk and talk about controversial issues – and so must he.

What can Romney say? Well, for starters, he can educate people about the central tenets of his faith, which remain something of a black box for many Americans. But more important, he must bridge the trust gap his Mormonism creates by making it explicit to voters that he is neither pawn nor theocrat, as he proved during his governorship of Massachusetts. Maybe Romney thinks this point is so obvious it doesn’t bear stating. It does. Finally, as part of a proactive, face-reality offensive, Romney might make it a priority on the campaign trail to identify and celebrate the values all people of faith share, Mormons included. Because if he doesn’t, chances are his opponents will make sure to exploit the differences.

But it’s not for us to say exactly how Romney tackles this matter. All we know is that if he doesn’t, it’s not going to go away.

Maybe we’re being paranoid.

Then again, these days everyone has to be.

Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric for 21 years and is the founder of the Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University. Suzy Welch is an author, speaker and the former Editor of the Harvard Business Review.

PHOTO: U.S. Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney shakes hands with supporters after speaking at his Florida primary night rally in Tampa, Florida, January 31, 2012. REUTERS/Mike Carlson

Have you ever woken up in the morning knowing you have to let someone go and just felt sick to your stomach? It’s the worst part of work, isn’t it? Even when it’s absolutely necessary — the money isn’t there or the employee hasn’t been contributing for ages — the emotional pain and mess of sending someone home is every good leader’s bête noire.

To make matters worse, letting someone go is, without doubt the moment when every leader is the most likely to screw up. Really screw up. Because when you fire a person the wrong way — that is, without generosity and respect — you can be sure of two things.

You’ve hurt someone unnecessarily.

And you’ve set up your organization for a future relationship from hell. After all, terminated employees don’t just fade away. They usually reappear, and pretty rapidly, as customers, suppliers, distributors, or in the worst-case scenario, competitors with an ax to grind.

By the way, this is a column about Ron Paul.

Yes, Ron Paul, and here’s why. The maxims of business and politics don’t always overlap, but when it comes to parting ways, they sure do. In business, firing someone incorrectly is a disaster that can haunt you for years. Same in politics.

Now, the GOP isn’t technically going to “fire” Dr. Paul. But look, even Ron Paul knows he’s not going to unpack his suitcases in the Lincoln Bedroom. At some point, his wildly entertaining, Don Quixote-like campaign for the White House is going to run out of time.

And then?

And then, GOP, watch out! Sure, it appears Paul is unlikely to mount a third-party campaign — he’s said so himself. But he’s also unlikely to spend the next few months out on the stump for the nominee, or even in dutiful silence. In fact, you can easily imagine Paul as an outspoken TV commentator from now until November, basically running without running just to keep his ideas in the mix.

But Paul is not really the GOP’s problem. It’s his followers, perhaps as much as 15 percent of the general electorate, many of them young, vocal and highly energized. Like Paul himself, they’re not exactly party regulars. No, Paul and his followers promise to be a lot like that fired employee who, if “handled” incorrectly at farewell, will make it his life’s work to, if not bring your organization down, at least show you how very wrong you were to cut the cord.

The Republican Party would be flat-out careless to let that happen. Dr. Paul’s exit isn’t exactly going to be unexpected. Plus, the GOP leadership has an excellent example of how to correctly part ways right under its nose — in President Obama’s masterful handling in 2008 of Hillary Clinton, a bitter opponent right to the end, and Joe Biden, an early loser in the Democratic primary race. Both of these “terminated” rivals, along with Bill Clinton and his minions, could have easily spent Obama’s general-election campaign and his first term engaged in subterfuge, natter-nattering to the media about the Newbie-in-Chief’s every little misstep. Instead, Hillary Clinton was given a big job and a big jet and the opportunity to become the most popular woman in America. And rather than being trundled back to his commuter seat on the Amtrak to Delaware, the gaffe-ridden Biden was anointed vice-president and given the not-insignificant job of humanizing the more aloof Obama, a role he clearly relishes.

And so it must be with the RNC and Ron Paul. There can be no brush-off. No “Phew, he’s gone. Now let’s get down to business.” No booby prize. Ron Paul needs to be given a role that really means something to him –- a role with influence and voice.

The details of this role are not for us to identify — they can only emerge from the kind of good-faith negotiations that party officials should initiate soon with the candidate. All we can say is, in this kind of setting, as in the best-practice business parting, the “victor” must err on the side of bigheartedness and dignity. Whatever speaking role Dr. Paul wants at the convention, give it to him. If he wants some sort of advisory role in the new administration, the answer is: “Of course.” Like a business leader designing a severance package with a key player, the GOP leadership’s mindset must be: “When he walks out that door, Ron Paul is going to be a friend for life.”

Because if he isn’t, Ron Paul and his followers will make their unhappiness known. And for the mishandling of this defining moment, the GOP will deserve their ire.

Just like any leader who botches goodbye.

Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric for 21 years and is the founder of the Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University. Suzy Welch is an author, speaker and the former Editor of the Harvard Business Review.

PHOTO: Republican presidential candidate U.S .Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) makes a point during the Republican presidential candidates debate in Jacksonville, Florida January 26, 2012. REUTERS/Scott Audette